The Sun Gods (30 page)

It had rained during the night, and thick patches of mist hung in the narrow valleys on either side of the dirt road. Never having driven in Japan before, Bill had to keep reminding himself to stay on the left, especially when huge logging trucks came tearing around hidden curves, forcing him over to the cliff edge above the river.

Mr. Nomura had told him to go through a place called Shiibaru and, a few kilometers later, turn right at Hakiai, but road signs were either nonexistent or lost in the fog. At Shimoyashiki a shaven-headed priest told him that he had missed the turn and would have to backtrack three kilometers.

All but their massive trunks shrouded in the mist, ancient trees towered over the narrow track to Momigi. A river was surely out there, just past the edge of visibility, but there was no fear of plunging in: with its grassy middle hump and two parallel ruts, the road itself probably would steer the truck even if he did not. He moved along slowly in first gear, the transmission whining, until the road suddenly broadened into a bumpy open space where there were parked an odd assortment of vehicles—two trucks, some hand carts, and three dust-smeared automobiles. He pulled up between the trucks and stepped out into the fog, buttoning the collar of his overcoat. Chilly drops fell from the branches high above, grazing his cheeks.

A path led to the right between two monstrous, shaggy trees. A short way down the incline, two rusty cables were anchored to the ground. The first few planks of a narrow bridge led out into the milky air. He grasped the cable on the right, stepping tentatively onto the first plank, and gave the bridge a good shake. It hardly budged. Mr. Nomura had told him that vines had supported the bridge in the old days, but even the steel cable was not entirely reassuring. For one thing, the railings formed by the cables on either side might be high enough by Japanese standards, but for someone his height they provided disturbingly little protection against toppling over the side.

Crouching slightly at the knees to keep his center of gravity low, he grasped both cables and set his whole weight on the bridge. The bridge swayed with each small step he took, but it was obviously not going to give way. Soon he was moving with more assurance, thankful that the thick mist prevented him from seeing what lay beneath him.

He came to a halt and gingerly looked around to see how far he had come, realizing with a start that he could see neither end of the bridge. He was suspended in space, the only sound the distant gurgling of the Momigi River far below.

There was a thickening in the fog ahead. He moved toward it, thinking it must be the place where the bridge dipped to its lowest point. The closer he came, the less fluid the thick area seemed, and just as he was beginning to search for other explanations for its presence, it shifted on the bridge, causing the planks beneath his feet to tremble. It was alive, and it had a definite human shape. He took another step, then drew to a halt.

As if in response to the pulse of energy his own movement sent along the bridge, the shape turned in his direction. It was an old woman in a faded gray kimono the color of the fog. The woman's small, angular face was topped by a stark-white mass of hair. Through the mist, her dark eyes focused on him. She looked genuinely startled.

Bill tried to speak, but he could force no sound from his throat. Could this be Mitsuko? She seemed far too old. After a few moments, she spoke to him in English: “Yes? Can I help you?”

“My name is Bill Morton, and—”

The woman's knees buckled, and she grabbed hold of him, all but pulling him over the cable and down into the gorge.

31

BILL GRABBED THE CABLE,
and shock waves ran up and down the length of the bridge.

“Billy!” the woman cried, her voice muffled against his chest.

Tentatively, Bill touched her shoulders as she clung to him. He hardly dared to speak as they swayed on the bridge.

The desperate grip around his waist began to relax and she raised her face from his chest. “You … are so grown up! “

Frank had told him that Yoshiko should be in her early sixties, but this woman seemed much older. The skin draped over her prominent cheekbones was deeply wrinkled, and her straight white hair seemed to belong to a woman in her eighties.

“Do you recognize me?” she asked, looking up at him with tearful eyes. “I am Aunt Yoshiko.”

She held her hand out. He took it and followed her from the bridge. She led him up a narrow path along the edge of a terraced rice field. They passed a cluster of small, weathered farmhouses with high, straw-thatched roofs, beyond which lay a field with close-cropped bushes arranged in long rows like giant green caterpillars lying side by side. Crouching amid the rows, two women in blue farm trousers looked up as they passed.

She led him through a small cedar grove, emerging at the other side to find a much larger house. Its thatched roof was battered and pitted, the bare boards of the siding showing signs of rot. With most of its storm shutters closed, the house looked empty, almost abandoned. He sensed that he would not find Mitsuko here.

He helped Yoshiko slide open the weather-beaten panel door that led into a dark, dirt-floored entryway. He pulled the door closed as she stepped out of her sandals up to the polished wooden floor. She turned toward him, bowing slightly, her bare toes peeking out from beneath her frayed kimono skirt.

“Please wait,” she said, disappearing into the gloom. He heard the clatter of storm shutters opening, and the house's interior began to lighten. Soon she returned with a lighted oil lamp and beckoned for him to step up to the wooden floor.

The floor felt smooth and cold. He followed her down a corridor and through an open sliding door into a small six-mat room. In the center of the room was a low, square table, a quilt trailing down its sides and onto the floor. Beneath the table there would be a heating device, just like the
kotatsu
he used in Tokyo for keeping warm.

“
Dohzo
,” she said, gesturing for him to sit on the floor and slide his legs in under the quilt. When he lifted the quilt, the smell of burning charcoal escaped. His legs fit into a sunken place in the floor warmed by charcoal instead of the usual infra-red lamp affixed to the underside of the table.

In a blue porcelain hibachi next to the table, a cast iron kettle stood on a tripod over glowing coals, wisps of steam drifting up from the spout as the water boiling within produced a tiny, bell-like sound. The wall opposite was dominated by a large mahogany wardrobe. With her back to him, Yoshiko knelt before the wardrobe, yanking open the top drawer and rummaging in among its overflowing contents. She pushed the drawer closed again and turned to Bill. In a formal kneeling position, she reached out toward the table and set a small brocade case before him, its colors faded, and stray threads dangling from its edges. Hands on her knees, she looked at him and at the case.

“Open it,” she said.

It was unexpectedly light. He eased the flap back and the object inside slid into his palm. A disk of oiled wood, its dark polished surface glowed in his hand. Great care had been lavished on the carving of a bird flying across the sun. The sun itself was a round disk-within-the-disk, its perimeter surrounded by flames. He turned the piece over on his palm to find a circular hollowed-out area in which the wood was rough, only the outer edge having been rubbed with oil.

“You broke the mirror,” said Yoshiko. “You were very naughty. Do you remember?”

“I don't know. Maybe not.”

“She wanted me to give it to you.”

He swallowed hard and looked again at the carved bird and sun. “Where is she?” he asked. “Is she living here with you?”

“No …” Yoshiko said vaguely.

“Is she in Japan? Don't tell me she went back to the States.”

Yoshiko shook her head, swaying the straight, white thatch of hair. “No, not back to America. She was with my parents and my younger brother, Ichiro …”

“She
was
with them … ?”

“In Nagasaki.”

So now his search was truly over. He would never see her again.

“I'm so sorry to have to tell you that.”

Bill hung his head. He felt as if everything—the waiting on tables at Maneki, the discussions with Frank Sano, the endless hours of language study, the courses on Japanese literature and history and society, the Fulbright application, the flight across the Pacific, the dark journey from Tokyo to Yatsushiro and on to Hitoyoshi, Toji, and finally Momigi—had lost any meaning they might have had.

“She loved you so much,” said Yoshiko. “She would have been thrilled to see you.”

“I was so sure … especially when I found you …”

“I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say.”

“Uncle Goro? Isn't he here with you?”

“He died in the relocation camp. I am alone.”

Yoshiko went back to the tall wardrobe, opening the lower drawer, which was as crammed full as the top one. She lifted a large photograph album from the top of the pile and set it on the table. Bound in disintegrating leather, the album began with formal wedding portraits, the young man in a high, stiff collar, the woman in typical Shinto garb, her
tsuno-kakushi
headpiece that supposedly covered the “horns of jealousy.”

“These are my parents, Tsunejiro and Somé Fukai,” Yoshiko said.

Bill wondered if a search for Mitsuko Fukai would have been any easier.

Yoshiko's brothers appeared next. Ichiro, one year younger than Yoshiko, was shown in an elaborate robe in his mother's arms being presented at the shrine at the age of seven days. Even Jiro, six years her junior, had beaten Yoshiko into the album. Yoshiko's picture first appeared when she was seven years old. Her parents brought her to the local shrine for
Shichi-go-san
, the “Seven-five-three” festival in which parents with children of those ages present them to the gods with thanks that they have reached these important points in their lives safely. “This was my first obi,” she said, pointing to the broad sash around the waist of the happy little girl in kimono.

“What year was that?” Bill asked.

“Meiji forty-one … 1908. Of course, I was only six by Western count.”

If she had been six in 1908, then she had been born in 1902. She was only sixty-one now. The years had been hard on her.

Mitsuko was shown at her first
Shichi-go-san
, at the age of three—or two by Western count—in 1914. Sweet and chubby, she could have been any of the fancily dressed little girls he had seen at the Meiji Shrine.

The Fukai children grew up as the pages flipped by before him. Mitsuko was skin and bones after shedding her baby fat, but had wonderfully bright eyes and a happy smile. She was definitely the best-looking member of the family.

The next album started with the bespectacled Goro and Yoshiko's wedding pictures. Mitsuko was still a little girl in the family portrait.

The scene changed to Seattle, and most of the images of Yoshiko and her husband were swallowed up in large group shots taken at the Japanese Christian Church.

“I even remember the address,” Yoshiko said. “Nine-oh-nine East Terrace Street. Goro and I were in charge of the Sunday school.”

It occurred to him that he hadn't noticed any religious paraphernalia in the house—neither cross nor Shinto god shelf nor Buddhist altar. “You must have been very active in the church.”

“Yes, very active in those days.” She smiled as if indulging in nostalgic thoughts. “But not anymore.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“After I came back here,” she said matter-of-factly, “I found out that the Christian god does not exist.”

“‘Found out'? How did you find it out?”

“I heard it out there,” she said, motioning vaguely toward the bridge. “The only gods are the sun gods,” she went on. “A new one comes into the world each day.”

She spoke of these momentous things as though she might be explaining to him how to cook rice or run the bath water.

In another of the group photos, Bill saw a blond, youthful Thomas Morton towering over rows of Japanese and standing by a banner reading “Japanese Christian Sunday school.” Bill had never seen his father smiling in such a genuinely happy, open manner, chin held aloft, his collar button ready to pop with pride. He wished he could have known him then.

Turning the page, Bill inhaled sharply. Not even two years old, he was in the lap of a Japanese woman in her twenties seated on a blanket spread on a lawn. His mouth and fingers were smeared with grains of rice. In the woman's face he could recognize the lively eyes of the skinny little Mitsuko, but here she was a beautiful woman, her long hair pulled back in a bun. She was not looking into the camera but at the child in her lap, and the smile she gave the little boy made the grown-up Billy's heart melt. It was almost unbearable to think that she was dead. He would never see her, never hold her.

Yoshiko let him gaze at the picture for a few minutes before turning the page. The next pictures were of the two sisters posing before tourist sites in Washington: Mount Rainier, the Columbia Gorge, Hurricane Ridge. But in these pictures she wore a touch of melancholy. One shot with the Olympic Mountains in the background clearly showed the double peak of The Brothers. It could only have been taken from one place: the bluff across the street from the house where he had grown up in Magnolia. To think that, as a boy, he had walked on the very patch of ground where she had once stood.

He found no pictures of Mitsuko with his father. Instead, the pages in this part of the album had rough patches, where the paper corners holding the snapshots in place seemed to have been torn away and rearranged. The pictures here showed him somewhat older—perhaps three or four. The last few pages in the album were empty.

“These are all the photos,” Yoshiko said.

Just then the house shook as someone struggled to open the front door. Bill leaned toward the window and slid the
shoji
back just in time to see a figure in blue mompe trousers darting away from the house. It appeared to be one of the farm women they had passed earlier.

“Just a moment,” said Yoshiko, gliding from the room. A few seconds later, she returned holding a tray with two steaming bowls of noodles, which she placed on the table.

“What a pleasant surprise,” Bill said.

“Follow me to wash,” Yoshiko said. She led him to a dark lavatory where a rusty pump fed into a slate sink. She pumped icy water for him while he washed his hands and face.

They ate the noodles in silence. The only sound was the soft ringing of the iron kettle on the hibachi. Yoshiko snagged the noodles with her chopsticks and slurped them up in the time-honored Japanese manner. Thanks to the steam and peppery seasoning, Bill warmed up enough to remove his coat for the first time.

“Delicious noodles,” Bill said, drinking down the last of the soup. “Who made them?”

“Tsugiko,” she said. “A tenant of ours. It's one of her duties.”

By then, the mist had lifted, and streaks of sunlight played across the
shoji
paper. He was feeling sleepy.

Yoshiko said, “Why don't you take a walk while I clean up?”

“I could use some fresh air,” Bill said.

Retracing their earlier path through the cedar grove, Bill came to the field with the hedges that looked like giant caterpillars. Everything was a rich green now in the sunlight.

“
Konnichi wa,
” he called to the woman working in the field.

She glanced up at him, dipping her head uncertainly.

He stepped down between the long hedges and approached her. “
Tsugiko-san deshoh ka
?” he asked—“Would you be Tsugiko?”

When she nodded shyly, he thanked her for the delicious noodles. He was probably the first foreigner she had ever met, and he was not sure that his Tokyo Japanese was making sense to her. He tried asking about this crop she was tending, and she answered clearly enough that it was tea.

“I understand you are one of Aunt Yoshiko's tenants,” he said.

The woman broke into ringing laughter, and her hand came up to hide her mouth. “Did she tell you that?” she asked. “There are no more tenants in Japan. General MacArthur ended all that. This farm is ours now.”

“Well, maybe she just said it from habit.”

“No, she knows better, but I am sure she still thinks of us as the family's tenants. Her brother sends us money every month to take care of her.”

“I hadn't realized there was another brother. I understand Ichiro was killed in Nagasaki.”

“Yes, everyone but Jiro. He lives in Tokyo.”